Monica C. Lewis, "Anthony Trollope and the Voicing of Victorian Fiction" (pp. 141––165) Although critics have read the intrusive nature of Anthony Trollope's narrators as everything from suicidal to cordial, little to no attention has been paid to the larger context in which these intrusions would have been voiced or to Trollope's carefully constructed relationship to the interpretive community upon which his literary livelihood depended. Well aware that his novels would be read aloud to his Victorian audience, Trollope adopted a particularly "modern" approach to the questions of audience and reception. At the moment of articulation, this essay argues, the voice of Trollope's author-narrator welcomes his listeners into a critical dialogue that calls into question not only the aesthetics of fiction but also moral and ethical codes, the construction of "character," and an increasingly modern world. Trollope's novel of life in the employ of the civil service, The Three Clerks (1858), is a heretofore-neglected case in point. The novel's protagonist, Charley Tudor, is both a clerk and an aspiring novelist; the reading aloud of his manuscript to an assembled company of admirers serves as a showcase for the ways in which Trollope expected his audience to engage with his own narratives. Drawing upon theories of reading and reception, recent scholarship on nineteenth-century reading practices and Trollope's negotiation of modernity, and evidence from Trollope's own experiences as a reader and writer, this essay exposes Anthony Trollope as a novelist whose ambivalent engagement with modernity found its expression in the dialogical space he created among author-narrator, reader, and listener.

The question of whose voice is speaking, the narrator's or the heroine's, is central in Jane Austen's Emma (1814), for although the two voices sound similar at points, the story that the heroine tells is but an incomplete part of the narrator's larger story. While Emma tells the story of her perceptions as they occur to her at the time, the narrator is telling the story of the gradual growth of Emma's consciousness. As the novel progresses, Emma's voice begins to resemble the narrator's in its ability to mix with another's consciousness. Her narrated monologues begin to incorporate others' voices, almost as if she has learned the narrative technique that Austen herself uses. Emma's voice, likes the narrator's, displays by the novel's end the ability to mix others' voices into her own; she gains the ability to "see" herself both from the inside and the outside. Emma's ability to learn narrative "skills" such as the fusing of other voices into her own represents the true mark of her maturity. In a sense, Emma learns what every good novel reader ultimately learns: how to see beyond her own mental confines by imitating the narrator's ability to incorporate others' consciousnesses into her own.